The Future Is Here: Cyborgs Walk Among Us

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When one-eyed filmmaker Robert Spence wanted to sell a
documentary film idea of becoming an "EyeBorg," he installed a
cheap LED light in his prosthetic eye. The simple addition
instantly made his cyborg concept recognizable to potential
business partners as he closed in on a possible deal for his
documentary.

Bionic beings who are part-human, part-machine may sound like a
concept that still belongs in science fiction stories. But
experts say that cyborgs are already walking among us, and have
been around for quite some time.

"Cyborg is your grandma with a hearing aid, her replacement hip,
and anyone who runs around with one of those Bluetooth in-ear
headsets," said Kosta Grammatis, an engineer who also worked with
Spence on the
EyeBorg project.

That illustrates the gulf between what experts and ordinary
people think of when they imagine a cyborg (cybernetic organism).
Many experts see a modern world filled with cyborgs, whether they
wear exoskeleton robot suits and prosthetic limbs or pacemakers
and eyeglasses. Yet the public still prefers the fictional
Robocop and Terminator – science fiction concepts that have not
yet become fully realized in the real world. [ 5
Reasons to Fear Robots ]

The stretchy definition of cyborg came up recently in an exhibit
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, which
listed both the villainous Darth Vader of Star Wars fame and the
heroic Master Chief from the popular Halo video games as cyborgs.

Few would dispute that Darth Vader fits the cyborg definition.
His transformation from
troubled Jedi Anakin Skywalker into the dark lord of the Sith
forces him to rely upon mechanical limbs and a life support
system that gives his breathing its classic menacing edge.

But Master Chief, a genetically enhanced "Spartan" super-soldier
who wears an armored power-suit, seems a more unlikely cyborg
candidate, according to popular opinion. More than 76 percent of
gamers on the website Giant Bomb do not consider Halo's
Spartans to be cyborgs, according to an informal poll
conducted by LiveScience.

"What a cyborg is, in big part, is a fictional character from the
future," Spence said.

From human to cyborg

The futuristic aspect of cyborgs weighs heavily on the popular
definition, as Spence quickly realized. His conceptual success
with EyeBorg's cheap light comes despite the fact that the
prosthetic acts as a separate camera and has no functional
connection to his body.

"Nobody calls people with a prosthetic eye cyborgs, but put in a
$5 LED light and you look like the Terminator," Spence pointed
out.

The Terminator also makes the cyborg list in the American Museum
of Natural History's
new brain exhibit. But whereas Darth Vader and Master Chief
(and Spence) began their lives as humans, the original Terminator
is a killer robot coated with living human skin and flesh – yet
sci-fi fans regularly refer to it as a cyborg.

Popular depictions of cyborgs seem to fall all over the spectrum
between human and machine. If Master Chief wearing a power-suit
is at one end, then Darth Vader sits somewhere in the middle and
the Terminator is at the machine end.

Then what about Luke Skywalker, the son of Darth Vader who loses
his hand during a lightsaber duel?

"You see Luke Skywalker in a famous ending [of "The Empire
Strikes Back"] opening, closing and flexing his hand," Spence
said. "That's a classic cyborg moment – he's wondering if he's a
cyborg."

Conscious computers

To add to the confusion, the museum's cyborg lineup is rounded
out by the Maria "machine-man" from the classic sci-fi film
"Metropolis" and the computer HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

HAL's inclusion in particular pushes the definition of a cyborg
to an extreme, and raises the question of whether or not an
artificial intelligence that gains self-awareness represents some
mix between man and machine without any organic parts.

"As far as we are aware, HAL has a machine/computer brain, which
pushes us into philosophical questions about whether it can ever
completely exhibit human consciousness," said Kevin Warwick, a
professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England.

A computer that had a brain made from biological neurons would
perhaps represent a more likely cyborg, Warwick suggested.

"The 'best' definition I have seen of a Cyborg is a human
enhanced well above the norm by technology which is integral to
the body – particularly integral to the nervous system/brain,"
Warwick told LiveScience in an e-mail. "I feel that this is the
sort of cyborg depicted/required by science fiction."

That approach fits with Warwick's own self-experimentation as
"Captain Cyborg." In 2002, he had a neural interface chip
implanted in his arm so that it could directly interpret signals
from his nervous system. He later demonstrated the ability to
directly control a robot arm and receive feedback from fingertip
sensors, and even experimented with a form of electronic
telepathy with his wife (who also had an implanted chip).

We are all cyborgs

Still, Warwick said that some definitions would allow any human
using any piece of technology – whether it's glasses, bicycles or
pens – to count as a cyborg. Many other experts agreed with the
most basic technical definition of a cyborg as a being that
combines technology with human biology.

Humans are and always have been cyborgs, according to George
Landow, a digital media scholar at Brown University. He pointed
to "the most powerful of all technologies" in the form of
language, and also included information technologies such as
writing and math.

"Certainly, anyone who uses clothing or an umbrella is a cyborg,"
Landow said. "Anyone who uses medication, contact lenses, is well
into cyborgism, and people like myself who have metal stents in
their hearts and artificial lenses inside their eyes (after
cataract operations), is definitely a cyborg according to the
most conservative, cautious definition."

Todd Winkler, a professor of music at Brown, has even suggested
that a pianist is a cyborg. The human musician knows how to play
the piano without the instrument, but isn't really a pianist
until he or she sits down at the piano.

Where we go from here

Something as mundane as a piano or clothing may indeed count as a
cyborg component, but people view such things as commonplace,
Spence explained. He suggested that technologies which already
serve humans today may never quite satisfy the hankering for a
really futuristic cyborg concept.

That implies the popular definition of a cyborg may simply be
doomed to forever drift just out of our reach – never in the now,
but always somewhere just beyond the future horizon.

"A cyborg is a human being who is
augmented by technology," Spence said. "I'd say it's the most
useful, super-technical definition, but it's the least fun. A lot
of the point of defining a cyborg is to have fun."